The Pain Box

“The pain scale measures only the intensity of pain, not the duration. This may be its greatest flaw. A measure of pain, I believe, requires at least two dimensions. The suffering of Hell is terrifying not because of any specific torture, but because it is eternal.” Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale.”

Sometimes pain is a box you can’t get out of. A claustrophobic sweaty box with nothing but pain inside. There’s no way out of the box except through time. No pills will allow you to space the box, they’ll just let the time pass faster relative to your thoughts. Your thoughts will circle around inside the pain box until the box is finally released. Sometimes the painkillers don’t even kill time.

It’s easy to make that mistake: your body isn’t the pain box. Even though it feels like it is. You are your body and the pain box is something else. The claustrophobia is just your body’s reaction to the pain box it can’t see or sense except through pain and therefore it can’t find an escape. Or an end. Which is the same thing.

Sometimes the pain is a man or a monster or some enormous, impenetrable cloud that stands or sits or hovers between you and everything else. Especially any work you need to get done. Especially focused thought that elapses in a nice, linear chronology. You keept trying to step around this pain man cloud monster or just look over its shoulder at the screen, but he punishes. He may be out there between you and the world, but he’s also inside. Like

Sometimes I think pain is the price we pay for the moments of extreme clarity, that lucidity that comes from a suddenly breaking free of the pain box or cloud or haze. Then I think this is just more self-abuse, just more capitalistic rationale in which everything, even pleasure, even a moment pain-free has a price. There is no calculus of pain to pleasure to lucidity. There is no variable that could ever equal pain. Pain is too enormous, too microscopic, too amorphous, too right fucking there. Pain is just pain. But what is that?